Daily Links From Glimpse From a Height

• Where Are Tomorrow’s Science Fiction Grand Master Writers?
  Asks the Guardian: But let’s pause there for a moment. As worthy as all the past winners of the Grand Master award undoubtedly are … what of the next generation? Is it feasible to now cast the grand master net wider, perhaps consider those writers born in the 1950s, or the 1960s? Even someone born […]
• Evolution of Logo Design
  Via Visual.ly:
• Play As Innovation
  Play as a mediating entity between too-much top-down and too much bottom-up innovation? Banal though it is, the Mars-Africa question does capture all the tensions of creative destruction: old money versus new money; expanding frontiers versus laggard rears; future prosperity versus present traumas; growth versus inequality; unknown adventures versus avoidable tragedies. But perhaps the central […]
• And They’ll All Want Lifts to Brown’s Hotel
  Via Shorpy.  The Atcheson, Topeka, and Santa Fe, 1943  
• Things You’re Not Supposed to Do With Google Glasses
  Like OD on TV: Things start to spin out of control. How could they not? It’s my childhood dream come true, this ever-present TV. My wife approaches me in the kitchen. I can see her mouth moving. I tell her, “I’m watching a Richard Pryor clip about the first black president. If it’s important, let […]

Daily Links From Glimpse From a Height

• Google Interiors
  Google is adding the interiors of some foreign train stations and airports to its StreetView. The article says that that makes it aimed at overseas travelers, but I think it’s still aimed at Americans.  I’ve rarely had a problem figuring out an American airport, and I can see where a foreign airport might be laid […]
• Doctor, Have You Washed Your Hands
  Via IDEO. Resembling an Apple computer mouse, the SwipeSense device clips easily onto hospital scrubs, recording every time users disinfect their hands. Together with wall-mounted proximity sensors, the system wirelessly tracks hand-washing practices, allowing doctors and nurses to see and download daily, weekly, or monthly reports, much like a FitBit, Nike Fuel Band, or other […]
• Blurring the Lines
  Aaron Renn of the relentlessly engaging Urbanophile posts on the need for our legal structure to change to accommodate peer-to-peer, where people more efficiently share resources rather than owning a lot of unused or idle capacity: But beyond the sheer efficiency gains, I think it’s under appreciated in developed countries how economic informality can create […]
• Hot Stove League
  Yes, the game does change. I’ve heard some fans comment that pitchers from the ’60s did not seem to throw with as much exertion as today’s hurlers, and therefore did not throw as hard. That may have been true of some pitchers in 1965, but certainly not Maloney. Although no radar gun was in evidence […]
• The Missiles of November
  Ana Palacio provides a Cold War nuke analysis redux: That Iran’s push to acquire the capacity to produce nuclear weapons is partly motivated by security concerns cannot be denied. Nationalism, however, is a more important factor. It is not just that all the great powers have nuclear weapons; the problem, from Iran’s perspective, is that […]
• Richard Samuelson on Immigration and Group Rights
  A conversation with Richard Samuelson about Constitutional principles, American exceptionalism, and immigration. It’s based on his article in last summer’s Claremont Review of Books on the subject.  In it, he makes an argument I’ve long favored, that Jews are only secure in a country where civil rights are individual, rather than group: The more elements […]
• The Iran Nuclear Agreement As a Modus Vivendi
  At Lawfare, a refresher course in the various level of international commitment: It is true that most non-proliferation agreements are concluded as Article II treaties, including the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.  But the Iran agreement lacks some indicia of formality, is short term, does not appear to affect state law, and apparently can be implementedwithout legislation […]

Daily Links From Glimpse From a Height

• WordPress.com vs. Censorship
  Going to bat for its users against DMCA abuse: The DMCA system gives copyright holders a powerful and easy-to-use weapon: the unilateral right to issue a takedown notice that a website operator (like Automattic) must honor or risk legal liability. The system works so long as copyright owners use this power in good faith. But […]
• Reprise: How AIPAC became Obama’s Syria Scapegoat
  From a few months ago: It’s an odd assertion, especially as it’s quite clear that the arrow pointed in the other direction: it was the White House that asked AIPAC to put its resources at Obama’s disposal and “do the president a solid,” as one official at a Washington-based Jewish organization told Alana Goodman at the Washington […]
• Arresting Spanish Tower
  Yes, that would have meant something different a little while ago.  Unfortunately, they forgot to include a picture of the view from the tower.  Via FeelGuide.
• Narrow Networks Suddenly a Bug, Not a Feature
  Last week, the Washington Post ran a story blaming insurers for limiting choices as a result of Obamacare.  Count on this to be a major part of the administration’s demonization efforts against insurance companies. Funny, I’m old enough to remember when this was a selling point.
• Tackling Cosmological Fine-Tuning
  Why does the universe appear fine-tuned for life?  This has been a question in science for as long as I can remember.  It’s a normal question – why do physical constants that appear to have nothing to do with one another nevertheless seem to be fine-tuned to one another?  Fine-tuning is a problem for scientists, […]
• Hunger Games: Catching Fire
  It’s a fine review, pointing out some of the flaws in the first film that we didn’t get because we haven’t read the books.  But then, I had to be talked into seeing the first movie, and perhaps rated it more highly because 1) the political analogy to today is unmistakable, and 2) I have […]

Daily Links From Glimpse From a Height

• What’s Farsi for “Danegeld?”
  That’s the assessment of Michael Doran of the Brookings Institution: …On the nuclear question specifically, I don’t see this as stage one. In my view, there will never be a final agreement. What the administration just initiated was, rather, a long and expensive process by which the West pays Iran to refrain from going nuclear. […]
• Transport Boondoggles
  They’re not just for light rail and high-speed rail. And let me put this one in a separate paragraph so you don’t miss it: building the Intercounty Connector caused the state to have to raise the gas tax. I repeat from the article: “increasing the gasoline tax.” The Washington area is famous for extreme traffic […]
• Gettysburg and the New “Proposition” of American Politics
  From The Witherspoon Institute: In Lincoln’s mind, the view of America “under God” hardly translated into a sweeping set of easily identifiable and zealously enforced public policies. His Second Inaugural makes it abundantly clear that “the Almighty has his own purposes” that may or may not comport with the popular religious assumptions of even the […]
• Minimalist Moscow Cabin
  Yeah, it’s probably the get-away for some well-connected plutocrat who slips Putin useful information every now and then.  Still.
• Eat Your Heart Out, Macy’s
• Brady v. Manning XIV
  Have they traded places? In thinking about Manning-Brady XIV, I started rereading some of those old debates and got thinking about the arguments that justified picking one over the other. After all, Brady-Manning wasn’t really about the players; it was a referendum on how you valued numbers versus winning and how much the rest of […]
• Gorgeous Linearity
  Indeed.  The whole post has 66 photos.

Daily Links From Glimpse From a Height

• Macy’s, Eat Your Heart Out
  Via Colossal:
• A Conflict of Visions on Colorado Education
  Tuesday night, the defeated Dems gathered to lick their wounds and survey the wreckage of Amendment 66.  Almost universally, they were unwilling to discard the grand vision of universal day care preschool and all-day kindergarten that Amendment 66 had promised, if not sold as. Yesterday, Joyce Rankin, wife of State Rep. Bob Rankin and a […]
• Villa Overby
  Sweden.  Lots of gorgeous pictures.  Two of my favorites: I’ve come to the tentative conclusion that, peaceful and calming as skillful modern architecture can be, it requires clean surfaces and long sightlines to work well.
• Retro Future Backsplash
  With Star Wars Death Star tiles: But at the same time, ILM needed whatever design they came up with to be practical, something they could build quickly and film from many different angles without obviously betraying that the so-called Death Star was just a model built on a warehouse floor. ILM’s solution was genius: they […]

Daily Links From Glimpse From a Height

• Some Conservative Advice for Chris Christie
  A reminder that he needs to embrace coalition politics, too: Now, that’s not a deal breaker. You feel the same way about us. There is nothing that says we conservatives can’t grow to like and/or trust you. Maybe we just got off on the wrong foot. So, in that spirit, let’s share our feelings. … […]
• Hope In Geneva
  “Iran Talks on Rocks As Two Sides Needle Each Other:” Still, the lack of any direct contact between American and Iranian negotiations on the second day of what is supposed to be a three-day conference was striking. American officials say the talks can be extended through the weekend if a deal was close at hand, […]
• Why Change The Rules When You Can Ignore Them?
  That’s what Will Baude argues at Volokh: What has the Senate actually done so far, with respect to the filibuster? Some of the reports of what happened today say that the Senate has adopted “new rules” eliminating the filibuster for some purposes. I’m not sure that’s true, in a formal sense. As I understand what happened, the […]
• Imagining the Post-Antibiotics Future
  By looking at the pre-antibiotics past.  With the lifetime of new drugs being shorter and shorter (how much of that is a result of longer and longer test cycles?), drug companies aren’t producing very many of them anymore: I’ve been taking a Coursera course on Nanotech 101.  Faster, please.
• Nasty As Well As Incompetent
  The always must-read Walter Russell Mead discusses Thomas Edsall’s New York Times op-ed, where Edsall blames mean-spirited white racism for Obamacare’s failures: Middle America isn’t frothing over Obamacare because we are a nation of racist policy wonks who did the math and hate the blacks. The public is angry first (as Edsall mostly seems to understand) […]
• Hickenlooper Joins Stapleton’s PERA Lawsuit
  I know for a fact that the governor’s office is legitimately worried about the parlous state of PERA’s finances.  Here’s some evidence: Gov. John Hickenlooper has filed a brief in support of Colorado Treasurer Walker Stapleton’s lawsuit seeking information about employee benefits in the state’s pension system. The Democratic governor’s brief asks the Colorado Supreme […]
• Say Goodbye to the Monroe Doctrine ?
  John Kerry, you’re no John Quincy Adams. Secretary of State John Kerry declared that “the era of the Monroe Doctrine is over” as he expressed chagrin over U.S. willingness to claim the power to repel European intervention in the Western Hemisphere for 190 years. Kerry’s declaration to the Organization of American States during a speech […]

Daily Links From Glimpse From a Height

• Why We Still Read Lincoln
  On the 150th of the Gettysburg Address, from Walter Berns of AEI: Of course, Lincoln did great things; greater than anything done by Wilson or Roosevelt, or Garfield, McKinley, and Kennedy; he freed the slaves and saved the Union, and because he saved the Union he was able free the slaves. Beyond this, however, it […]

Daily Links From Glimpse From a Height

• China Offers Administrative Fix to Labor Camps
  Via Quartz: The question now is what exactly abolishing laojiao will entail. According to Human Rights Watch (HRW), the government has considered replacing it with another system, which also allows long-term detention without trial but with some new rights like access to counsel. “It is therefore unclear, after the government ‘stops using’ the system, whether it will be reformed, […]

Daily Links From Glimpse From a Height

• Putting African “Power Pimps” Out of Business
  What do you do when you have cell phones but no power? It’s hard to imagine the concept of a “power pimp” in Africa unless you have lived there. But it makes sense and cents on a continent that lacks a unified power system. There is basically no electric power in most rural places unless […]
• Tea Party Despair and ObamaCare
  A piece from a few weeks ago that’s still valid: Despair is a contagion that can kill a political movement. As Pete Wehnerbrilliantly noted here earlier today in his piece about the Tea Party mindset, the apocalyptic view of the ObamaCare defunding fight has led many conservatives to take an all-or-nothing position that sees greater value […]
• Fed Really, Really Wants to End Too Big to Fail
  Barry Ritholtz at Bloomberg notices consensus at the Fed on at least one policy issue: Perhaps most notable is Dallas Federal Reserve Bank President Richard W. Fisher’s remarks, Ending ‘Too Big to Fail,’ earlier this year. A conservative who dislikes government intervention in markets and despises bailouts, Fisher is concerned that TBTF will eventually require more of both. […]

Daily Links From Glimpse From a Height

• 100 Best, 100(+) Years Ago
  The perishability of immortality. The 100 Best Novels, as selected in 1898: Sometime editor of the Illustrated London News, an authority on the Brontës and Napoleon, Clement K. Shorter was in the middle of a flourishing career when this list appeared in the monthly journal called The Bookman. He doesn’t explain what exactly makes a book one of […]
• State And Local Government Austerity Is Over
  So says Bill McBride over at Calculated Risk: The blue bars are for residential investment (RI), and RI was a significant drag on GDP for several years. Now RI has been adding added to GDP growth. The red bars are the contribution from state and local governments.  Although not as big a drag as the housing […]
• The Case for Kurdistan
  It’s not just cynical manipulation, or at least, it doesn’t have to be: The Kurds scattered contiguously across Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Syria, are a group whose interests make them a natural partner to the US in the Middle East. While they are Sunni Muslims, the Kurds identify overwhelmingly with their cultural and linguistic heritage, […]
• Republicans, Some Democrats Backed Failing Energy Company
  It turns out there’s an energy boondoggle worse than Solyndra out there: Public support for the United States Enrichment Corp. far exceeds what was lost on the infamous Solyndra solar energy boondoggle, and funding provided ostensibly to build a new plant will almost certainly yield the same results for taxpayers — nothing. The company has […]
• Why Ken Cuccinelli Really Lost
  Rich Shaftan, an experienced political consultant, brings a sober analysis to the table, dispelling myths and drawing lessons.  Everything I’ve seen from Rick is level-headed and devoid of the blamethrowing that’s become far too common in these post-mortems.  Among the key items: THE “REPUBLICAN PARTY SCREWED CUCCINELLI” MYTH The Republican Governor’s Association put $8 Million […]